BLOG-O-RAMA (The Dirty Sanchez Experience)

posted by cs004 on Oct 20

On the hectic date of Sunday, October 19, 2008, I went to LVC’s Studio C, the mastering suite, to observe Shannon Streifeneder’s “Guitarboi” project. She was working on a track that her Recording III teacher had given to her entire class to master, “Guitarboi,” a gentle acoustic song. Shannon was using Pro-Tools 7.4.2 originally for this project. The first order of business for Shannon was to work on the drum track. She didn’t really like it and wanted to dabble with the EQ levels. Soon afterwards she quickly decided that what was needed was a drum doubling. She doubled the drum track and added a limiter, resulting in a dramatic experiment of “lots of knob twisting” (qtd. by John Heenan in Studio C). After this experiment, Shannon concluded that this was not was was needed. She deleted the doubling and began playing around with the other track, once again dabbling with EQ options. Shortly afterwards, Shannon decided she’d need a fade out. She exported the file as a WAV file to Apple’s Wave Burner because apparently Wave Burner has better fade out options than Pro-Tools. Once we were on Wave Burner with the file open, we ran into a tragic problem: There was no output signal from the computer to the monitors!!! And quite tragic it was, for how was Shannon supposed to work on her project, let alone teach a group of eager freshmen, if she couldn’t get pristine sound quality for her project. After a few phone calls and much Wave Burner and Apple computer sound/output option experimentation, this savy upperclassmen and righteous freshmen group were on the way! We got the monitors to work, and Shannon added her fade out in the song. Lastly she added a limiter once more to boost the overall level of her project. Once the mastering part of her project was done, she burnt the track on to a C.D at the slow option speed to ensure good sound quality. Finally, she was done and we were taught!